You can make decisions as you design and deploy your Group Policy Objects (GPOs) that will have an impact on how quickly your Windows desktops start and become usable to your users. Some of these decisions are obvious, while many are not. This post will...

Alan and I had a great time presenting about Group Policy Preferences at TechEd Australia a few weeks ago. He did a quick demo in our session about configuring Power Schemes; here's the breakdown in more detail. He captures the idea of targeting power...

You might know GP Preferences is great for mapping drives , pushing out shortcuts, and adding new folders. But did you know that you can use GP Preferences to add a printer and set it as default? Check it out:
Here’s the Devices and Printers inventory...

I set a Preference setting, but it didn’t work. The answer? Probably F5-F6-F7-F8.
GP Preferences has a ton of compelling reasons to use it; the functionality allows admins to configure settings that are difficult to impossible to achieve through...

How could something like CRUD be desirable? In Group Policy world, even the impossible becomes possible. In this entry, you’ll discover why Red does not mean Error and what the different colors mean when you make a Preference item. Read on!
Let’s talk...

Hi, I’m Florian, one of the Group Policy MVPs . You may know us MVPs from conferences, seminars, books, Newsgroups and Forums where we voluntarily provide help and guidance to Group Policy and its associated products. Today, I’d like to write about a...

You might have seen GP MVP Jeremy Moskowitz’s post on how to recycle GPO comments . While Jeremy points out you can do this without a script…. You can also do it with a script! Our tech writer, Judith, walks us through the process: After I import...

Wow! What a confusing title. So, why did I use this?
Your feedback tells us there is some confusion over our terminology for our new extension, Group Policy preferences. And I aim to clear up this confusion in this post.
In the beginning of Group...

Group Policy Preferences quick tip: To ensure that preferences are applied to clients, make sure that clients have the CSEs and XMLLite installed
If you’re like us, you’re seriously excited about Group Policy Preferences. You’re excited because you...

Happy Holidays!
http://www.youtube.com/user/jeremymoskowitz#p/u/0/UsYkbLzVsM8
This is the Group Policy present you've been asking for : a step by step video of how to install the GPMC using a GUI or a commandline from Jeremy Moskowitz, one of our...

There was a great question in the blog comments, I’m going to post the answer up here because I think the answer is cool. Can a location (UNC) be set using both an environmental variable and a static entry? I'll explain by example. Let's say that...

Group Policy in Windows Server 2012: Using Remote GPUpdate If someone calls to say their computer doesn’t work quite right, the first thing you might have them do is run gpupdate /force to ensure they have the latest policy applied to their system. Now...

It’s interesting what you can discover when you right-click on something. For example, in the Group Policy Management Console (the GPMC) you can right-click on a domain and select “Search”, and a this amazing tool presents itself. This handy search tool...

You may be asking yourself, “What does infrastructure status have to do with Group Policy”. Well, group policy depends on other technologies to ensure that policy settings are replicated throughout your environment so that end users / computers...

How to: use F5-F6-F7-F8 to control what settings you want pushed out, lock down the Advanced tab with a preference setting to act like policy
Last time I talked about how to use F5-F8 keys to use the glanularity that we love so much about Preferences...

The Group Policy settings reference spreadsheet that covers the available administrative template settings and security settings for Windows Server 2012, Windows 8, and all earlier versions of Windows is now available in the download center here: http...

Too often, I ask if people are familiar with GP Preferences and get a blank stare. I will say this over and over again:
GP Preferences will dramatically reduce your logon scripts
GP Preferences has clean, easy-to-use reporting and UI
Lots...

We have a new document in our technet library. The Core Network Companion Guide has a section specifically about Group Policy Deployment . Check it out! Or just take a look at James McIllece’s blog post summarizing the deployment guide companion .

This blog post is written by Judith, our technical writer, and based on an old blog post by Jeffrey Snover. ( http://blogs.msdn.com/b/powershell/archive/2007/01/11/sorting-out-groupby.aspx ) Jeffrey wrote a piece that showed how to sort system services...

We already talked about Darren's tool to investigate Group Policy performance , so here's what some other GP MVPs are up to:
Jeremy Moskowitz blogs about how to use his product, PolicyPak , to disable various 3rd party software through Group Policy...

Hey – this is Florian from the GP Team’s MVPs again. It seems like some of you would like set up WMI filters. Let me show you how to use a tool called Scriptomatic to make it easier. Or, skip to the end to see how much faster it is to do the same thing...

Have you ever wanted to configure a preference item to include a specific user name and password? You can do so in several types of preference items, but you should first consider the security ramifications of embedding a user name and password in a preference...

Lots of people ask the Group Policy Team: What are the best settings to configure? What is the most secure GPO we can deploy? I've been talking about this a lot with the Group Policy customer support folks, and the topic resulted in the following editorial...

We have stated a number of times through a number of forums that its not a great practice to muck around with the Default Domain Policy and the Default Domain Controllers Policy. In fact its actually a really bad practice...same goes with the SYSVOL....

Another change we made in Windows Server 2012 is in the Resultant Set of Policy reports. In previous versions of Server, you had to look at the results report, and the event log, and the tracing logs to find all the information you needed about...